Little Arctic, R.I. and Its Amazing Theater

Theater should be readily accessible, affordable and good. For me, the ideal theater experience has always been to pop off to the theater at the last moment and get an affordable seat.

There was a time when you could do that in London and New York. But theater-going has become an expensive chore, both in the West End and on Broadway: Buy exorbitant tickets far in advance, drive, park and get a bill for the evening which can run to over $500 for two.

Not so where I live — just down the street from the amazing Arctic Playhouse, which is to theater what food trucks are to restaurants: accessible, affordable and good.

The Arctic Playhouse is by any measure an anomaly. It just shouldn’t be. Arctic is a distressed hamlet in West Warwick, R.I. Once, it was prosperous shopping area near working textile mills. Now it has fallen on hard times, having lost its retailing base to shopping centers. Washington Street, its main street, has boarded-up shops and a pervasive sense of decay.

But Arctic has live theater at the Arctic Playhouse: a very modest but nonetheless effective theater space where, for under $15, you can see what is often a damn good show. The theater, by the way, will be moving to a larger space on the same street.

I write this in the warm glow of having just seen such a show with my wife: “I Love … What’s His Name?” As its subtitle says, it’s a cabaret about confusion in love in the 21st century.

We were dubious, but we really like the spirit and intimacy of our neighborhood theater and its energetic impresarios, Jim Belanger and David Vieira.

So we ate a light supper and drove a few minutes to be enchanted by a clever review, well-executed by a topnotch cast, including co-creators Rachel Hanauer and Jeff Blanchette, Angela Jajko, Jessica Gates and supported with industrial-lifting, as it were, from pianist Bob Logan.

The cabaret featured a series of ballads and patter songs — some by musical greats, like Tim Rice and Stephen Sondheim — about dating. Very modern, too: Cell phones play a big part in a show that is funny, tuneful and rip-roaring good entertainment.

I’ve always said you don’t need a palace to put on a good show, just good players. It’s about the play and the players, as Shakespeare said in “Hamlet,” not the venue. Arctic proves that, production after production. Local fun in a clubby atmosphere with free cookies, decaf coffee and popcorn, and a full, cash bar.

Give my regards to Broadway, but you won’t be seeing me in many a day.

If You Want Great Fish and Chips, Try New England

Rightly, you think the national dish of Britain is fish and chips. Well, maybe not anymore.

It is increasingly hard to find fish and chips in Britain and Ireland. Not impossible, but harder than it was when there was a fish-and-chip shop, known as a chippie, almost on every corner.

The other shocking thing is that the fish and chips in the chippies, when you find them, are likely to be squeezed in with other fast food —hamburgers, sausages and even lasagna.

What you are more likely to find in every town or village is an Indian or Pakistani restaurant. In fact, I’ve read it argued that the national dish of England is no longer fish and chips, but curry and rice.

But I’m delighted to report that some of the best fish and chips to have crossed my plate in a long time are to be found in New England, particularly in Rhode Island. Almost every restaurant and bar has very good fish and chips. Excellent, in fact, but missing that standard of the British Isles version: mushy peas. You don’t have to have them with your battered cod in the U.K., but you’d be missing the full experience if you don’t.

Why, I wonder, with so much excellent haddock around, is there no smoked haddock to be had? Finnan haddie is just not on sale among the wonders of the sea in every supermarket. The Brits like to eat it at breakfast, and the French serve it as a main course. My wife, Linda Gasparello, who grew up in Hingham, Mass., says finnan haddie and cod cakes were regular offerings on South Shore menus.

Very good too. Ladies and gentlemen, start your smokers.

The Myth of the Frozen North

We moved to Rhode Island from the Washington, D.C. area five years ago and we still shuttle back and forth with some regularity. It is hard to be a journalist and not be drawn into the Washington maelstrom.

We sing the praises of Rhode Island as loudly as operatic stars. We go on about its great food, wonderful beaches, fabulous architecture and nice people.

But people in Washington, and elsewhere in the country, believe that we live in igloos, kept warm at night by a five-dog team of huskies. They believe the cold dominates our lives and that we drive Humvees to get through the snow.

It’s not an argument we have been able to win. But the fact is the climate in most of New England is much better than the climate down in the nation’s capital where the summers are insufferably hot and humid and the winters can be as cold as they are in Providence. There is less snow there, but everything ceases up when it does snow —usually a big one every year.

The pathological fear of cold keeps people away and living in worse climates. Pass the grog.

A population catastrophe is in the making in Africa that could engulf the world, Europe first. The United Nations predicts that between now and 2050 the populations of 26 African countries are expected to at least double their current size. Nigeria will overtake the United States to become the world’s third most populous country in 2050.

By the year 2050, according to the United Nations, annual increases will exceed 42 million people per year and total population will have doubled to 2.4 billion. “This comes to 3.5 million more people per month, or 80 additional people per minute. At that point, African population growth would be able to refill an empty London five times a year,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper calculates. Poor Africa, with so little to support a doubling population, is on its way to new horrors of food shortage, lack of jobs and misery.

This is not just crisis for Africa but very much one for Europe, and in time one for other countries.

African migrants, fleeing broken societies and imminent famine, have been crossing the Mediterranean in rickety craft, flooding Europe. This flood will grow and it will be joined by people seeking survival from deeper in Africa; not just from the north, but from the center and the south.

Desperate people move. Take the Royhinga refugees, walking with what they can carry from Myanmar to Bangladesh: a journey from unsafe to unwelcome. It is already happening in Africa and it will dominate in future.

India, which knows something about population explosions (the population there has grown from 400 million, when the British pulled out in 1947, to 1.3 billion), has looked for a way of improving expectations as a means of population stabilization. Their solution has not been droves of family planners with suitcases of condoms, but rather a bold, high-tech solution: electricity and lots of it.

In New Delhi, this strategy was explained to me by a professor at the University of Delhi. As an American, I was aghast at the poverty and the minimal lives lived by tens of millions. Almost verbatim, this is what I was told, “We have a solution to this misery: an electric grid. When we electrify a village, everything changes. Someone gets a television — maybe an old black-and-white one, but Indians are good at keeping things running — and then expectations go up, hygiene improves, and birth rates go down.”

He added, “It works.”

That, maybe, is why today India is one of the leaders in building electric capacity of all kinds, including an ambitious nuclear program.

Electricity provides a solution in Africa, but much of the installed electric capacity is old, serves only urban areas and dates back to the colonial era.

In Africa and South America, I have seen electricity transform lives. An electric supply leads to the ability of villages to move basically from the Iron Age to the Ion Age.

I saw this acutely in my childhood in Africa. An electrified village can keep its food supply from rotting, grind its grain instead of shipping it to a mill, allow local businesses to get a footing, and limit family size. But mostly the young, whether through television or radio, are inspired to greater expectations, to horizons beyond the squalor and poverty that has been their inheritance.

The European media have been covering the African population flood with intensity, particularly the BBC. Yet much of this has had a hand-wringing quality.

As we see the lethality of electricity failure in Florida, following Irma, we again get a sharp lesson in the value to human life of electricity, unique in service to human kind.

If Africa is not to become a huge and permanent humanitarian crisis, affecting the whole world, it needs to get in on the electric solution. Ideally, this should be first with the fuels available: sun and wind. These are peculiarly suited to Africa: poor, desperate Africa where people hurt so much, every day.

Photo: ACCRA, GHANA – MARCH 4, 2012: Unidentified Ghanaian people at the market in Ghana. People of Ghana suffer of poverty due to the unstable economic situation. Credit: Anton_Ivanov / Shutterstock.com

Following Donald Trump’s inauguration as president the world is anticipating a new, and potentially radically different era for the United States. The inauguration also prompts questions about this new style of politics.

Trump’s surge to leading the most powerful nation in the world was fueled by a rhetoric we associate with a new term: post-truth. The Oxford dictionary named post-truth its word of the year in 2016, and defined it as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Brexit, and Trump’s success were new lows for many of us, particularly in higher education, precisely because facts came a distant second to populist appeals.

But, as a number of people have identified, post-truth didn’t begin with Trump.

One reference point for the two campaigns 2016 will be remembered for has been the propagandism of the 1930s, and two wickedly cynical pieces of advice: repeat lies often enough until they are accepted as true, or remember if you are going to lie, tell a big lie.

But almost a century earlier, in the 1850s, there was a far dirtier U.S. election campaign where an anti-immigration party, the Know-Nothings, actively thrived on pretending to be ignorant of their own party’s activities.

Further back still, before U.S. independence, the satirist John Arbuthnot wrote: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it, so that when Men come to be undeceived, it is too late … like a physician who has found out an infallible medicine after the patient is dead.” The title of his 1712 essay? “The Art of Political Lying.”

And way, way before Arbuthnot, in 350 BC, Aristotle’s “Constitution of Athens”describes the demagogue Cleon in a way Trump critics might recognize: “The cause of the corruption of the democracy by his wild undertakings.”

A closer look at Cleon invites several parallels with how critics see Trump. Cleon inherited his wealth from his father in the form of a tannery, a leather factory; certainly, the Athenian equivalent of blue-collar.

He rose to power in 430 BC, during a desperate time for Athens — it was at war with Sparta and was devastated by plague. Plutarch describes him as someone who “catered to the pleasure of the Athenians” with a combination of “mad vanity,” “versatile buffoonery” and “disgusting boldness.”

Cleon had a distinctive and shocking communication style, one Athenians had never seen before. While speaking, he would hitch his cloak up and slap his thighs, running and yelling at the crowds.

Aristotle says he was “the first to use unseemly shouting and coarse abuse.” Aside from this radically new communication style, Cleon’s populism was based on attacking two enemies.

First, though wealthy himself, he was an anti-establishment figure, pursuing a “relentless persecution of the upper classes.”

Second, he was a flag-waving xenophobe, antagonistic towards Athens’ rival and (partly thanks to Cleon) bitter enemy Sparta, as well as to the city of Mytilene, who wanted independence from Athens.

The Athenian general and historian Thucydides even records a speech where Cleon expresses admiration for Mytilene’s “unassailable” walls.

Parallels don’t end there. A later Athenian writer, Lucian, suggests Cleon profited from exploiting his office as some warn Trump is set to do and that he was “venal to excess” (as Trump detractors suggest).

He was boastful, once bragging that he could win a war against some Spartans by himself. He was thin-skinned and censorious, as well as a litigious bully.

Cleon tried, unsuccessfully, to have the satirist Aristophanes prosecuted for writing “The Babylonians,” which he considered a treasonable play — in the process turning Aristophanes into a lifelong enemy.

He accused Athenian generals of incompetence and, in establishment-bashing mode tried, unsuccessfully, to prosecute one of them, Laches.

Cleon was held responsible for the eventual exile of another, Thucydides, who as well as being a general is sometimes described as the founder of history.

Indeed, Thucydides’ contribution was to found a tradition of historians as being concerned with facts and the truth.

Throughout this period Cleon was the biggest obstacle to normal relations with Sparta and within a year of his death a peace treaty was agreed.

History was certainly not kind to Cleon, and perhaps Trump will not be showered in praise either.

In Cleon’s case this was no surprise perhaps given that he exiled the most eminent Athenian historian and tried to silence the most eminent Athenian satirist.

This has an unusually small cast because it is essentially a relentless assault on the character Paphlagon, who is obviously based on Cleon: “the leather-seller” with a “gaping arse,” “a perfect glutton for beans” who loudly “farts and snores,” an “arrant rogue” and “mud-stirrer” with a “pig’s education” and the “stink of leather” — “this villain, this villain, this villain! I cannot say the word too often, for he is a villain a thousand times a day.”

Cleon may well have had a front-row seat for “The Knights,” where he would have seen Aristophanes playing Paphlagon/Cleon, presumably because no one else dared to.

Characters in these plays were masked, but no prop-maker dared make a mask resembling Cleon.

We might imagine Cleon later reviewing “The Knights” as: “A totally one-sided, biased show — overrated! The theater must always be a safe and special place. Apologize!”

What matters is that Aristophanes’ contemporaries awarded “The Knights” first prize at the Lenaia festival (something like Athens’ Cannes Festival).

Cleon’s brand of post-truth politics flourished because when life is extremely hard, facts are not as novel or distracting as sensationalism.

Some Athenians were won over by the novel spectacle of yelling, coarse abuse and thigh-slapping — and distracted by diversionary ranting against Sparta.

Critics of Brexit and Trump might say voters were won over by bus-sized gimmicks or tweet-sized slogans — where both camps painted “enemy” over an anonymous other.

Last year was a bad year in which millions were desperate for change, but perhaps what we saw was an age-old spectacle. Populism and appeals to emotion always work on some people. When times are bad enough they work on enough people.

One consolation for Trump’s opponents and Remainers is that the Athenians kept Cleon partly in check using existing governance mechanisms: the courts.

They can also take comfort that contemporary culture remembers Cleon through the eyes of his bitter enemy Aristophanes. Cleon’s era was horrific yet it also became a golden age for satire and saw the birth of the discipline of history.

The worst fears for the Trump presidency are bleak, but civilization survived Cleon. Shortly after his death, we saw another kind of Athenian golden age — with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle laying down the basis for Western philosophy and civilization.

They taught the importance of skepticism and scrutiny, and of virtue. They placed the ultimate premium on the search for knowledge and truth.

In the “Rhetoric” Aristotle gave us all the tools we need to see through a Cleon. Indeed, he wanted rhetoric to be widely understood so politicians’ arguments were evaluated on their merits rather than the wrapper (or bus) they arrived in.

Kevin Morrell is professor of strategy at the Warwick Business School, part of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. He researches rhetoric in politics.

There must be a special place in hell for the gatekeepers — with a special circle for the Washington gatekeepers. These nonentities man the gates in Washington and, by design or simple obduracy, pervert the purposes of government.

They also fuel the lobbying industry. The name of that game is “access” and it is sold openly. If you have worked on Capitol Hill or in a cabinet secretary’s office, bingo! You have access.

Chances are the general public, journalists or others who need to speak to the principals, whether elected or appointed, will not get a look in because of the gatekeepers: those busybodies who take it upon themselves to affect things by blocking messages or meetings.

In Washington at present, the gatekeepers have more power than I have seen in 50 years. You have the constitutional right to petition your elected and appointed officials. But that right is abrogated if you cannot get through the door.

That is where the lobbyists come in; they can get through the door and influence the principals.

None of this is new, but there is a new dimension. Time was when you could get into federal buildings and walk around. That meant you had a chance of literally bumping into people you might want to buttonhole. Now surly guards demand appointments and IDs. A chance encounter with an assistant secretary is no longer in the cards.

There are channels that are harder for the new face to navigate than for those who have “access.” As most of us do not have this means of entry, we must settle for not being heard or getting routine rejection from the staffer manning the gate.

I have never known a time when the bureaucracy was so indifferent to the public when it comes to access. If a reporter does not cover a particular department regularly, your request for an interview will be sidelined or ignored. And if you represent a publication that does not have the weight of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you will be dismissed.

Friends of mine work who for a charity dealing with a terrible and under-reported disease, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, have found the gatekeepers not only unhelpful but obstructionist at the Department of Health and Human Services and its agency, the National Institutes of Health.

When I managed reporters in Washington, I urged them to find ingenious ways around the gatekeepers, such as riding back and forth on the subway that carries members from the Capitol to their office buildings. Eventually, you would have a word with a congressman. And, surprise, surprise, he or she would be happy to oblige, unaware of the barriers erected around them by their gatekeepers. I have known senators who would sit in their offices hoping to see a new face, while their staffers turned them away.

Unfortunately, the phenomenon of out-of-control gatekeeping is not confined to the government and Congress. It is now rampant throughout society.

But it is the isolation of government from the people that is damaging and pernicious. It is that which creates and feeds the wrongs of lobbying and establishes the power of the elites.

Officialdom knows that saying “no” has more power than saying “yes.” The gatekeepers, who decide who should be heard and who should be denied, have always been with us. Witness the courts of Europe.

To get around the Washington gatekeepers, here are some extreme measures:

Get a home address for the person you want to talk to — there are many services that will sell you armfuls of personal information, including home address and telephone numbers.

Join the person’s church — public piety is in.

Go wild on social media — shame the person.

You could, I suppose, try sending a drone with a message through the window of the unfortunate one you have been denied access to. But I would not advise that, just yet. — For InsideSources

You did not have to be told that William “Bill” McCollam, Jr., who died on July 30, 2016, at the age of 91, was a soldier. His deportment shouted it: square shoulders, straight back and erect head. I wondered whether his toes were equally straight.

I knew him as the distinguished head of the Edison Electric Institute, during a period of change for it and the electric utility industry. He oversaw its move from New York to Washington in 1979 — a move that reflected the greater role of government in energy during the turbulent decade of energy shortages, which began with the Arab oil embargo in 1973.

McCollam was a scholar. He entered Louisiana State University when he was 15, graduated in 1946; entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, graduated from there with honors; and earned his Masters of Engineering in 1954 from MIT.

He was a soldier, serving in the Korean War, participating in the Battle of Inchon, and receiving two Bronze Stars for service in the 2nd Engineer Special Brigade.

He was a teacher, returning to West Point as an instructor in the Department of Military Art and Engineering from 1958-61. He served in the Army Corps of Engineering from 1946-61, where he achieved the rank of lieutenant colonel.

When McCollam went to work for Arkansas Power and Light in 1961, electric utilities were facing major changes. Executives with his skills were in demand, not the least of which was his gentlemanly manner. He was a New Orleans gentleman in the best sense: courteous, considerate and generous.

It must have been a glad day for McCollam and his wife, Hope, when he landed a job as executive vice president of New Orleans Public Service, both had deep family roots in Louisiana. In 1971, McCollam was named president of the company, which also ran the public transit system .

Years later, I would argue with McCollam about the economics and purposes of public transit systems. He, with his gift for numbers, was not in favor of public transport because of the high cost. I, with my experience in London, thought it was a worthwhile expense in order to keep cities moving and their economies competitive. McCollam, as I recall, averred in that lovely Southern way of his.

McCollam expected “every man to do his duty.” That was his management style: steadfast, no histrionics, no flamboyance.

I remember less of my encounters with him by day than with our evenings together. He and Hope would take my wife, Linda Gasparello, and I to dinner, and then to hear a National Symphony Orchestra concert. On these occasions, he would lay aside somewhat his correctness to venture a risque joke and to be a little less the officer and more the man.

In the Army McCollam was stationed in Guam, Japan and Korea, and he maintained a keen interest in international affairs. That may have been the key to his warm friendship with David Fishlock, the late London correspondent of The Energy Daily and science editor of the Financial Times. Fishlock appreciated McCollam’s engineer’s mind and the cuisine of New Orleans, which he and Hope always waxed lyrical about.

His successor and current president at EEI, Tom Kuhn, kept McCollam on as an international adviser. And he flourished in one of those busier-than-before retirements.

Bill McCollam could not have engineered a better life for himself. His was a life in full and in order.

Can Vietnam talk some sense into North Korea, and in so doing make itself the go-to country in Asia for diplomatic fixes? There are those in Hanoi, and quite a few scattered across the foreign policy establishment, who think so.

Vietnamese President Tran Dai Quang believes so, and would like to be the intermediary between the United States and North Korea.

Back-channel talks — if they can be called that — have begun. Influential American academics have met with leaders in Vietnam and President Quang has been involved. An idea, however inchoate, is in the air in Hanoi – and the government would very much like to see the concept grow.

For Hanoi, being useful to both Washington and Pyongyang, would help Vietnam gain international stature, as well as accelerate its importance in the region.

Globally, Asian scholars and diplomats are hoping to see strong initiatives, particularly from the United States, to affect the seeming intractability of a number of issues in Southeast Asia, which include North Korea’s adventurism and China’s continued expansion in the South China Sea. An additional irritant is China’s damming of the Mekong River, starving Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia of water.

No one involved believes that a communications channel will cause Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, to abandon his war games with rocket and missile tests. But they do believe that when and if there is a need to have some kind of opening to North Korea, and to speak to its obtuse leadership, Vietnam is uniquely well-placed facilitate a conversation.

Vietnam, like North Korea, has fought the United States. It also knows what it is like to be dependent on China for its survival, as North Korea is and as North Vietnam was. It also knows what it is like when that kind of lifeline of dependence goes wrong. Vietnam fought a war with China in 1979, with intermittent clashes until 1990.

Hanoi’s hopes to become a bigger player in the Asia diplomatic firmament extend beyond helping the United States with Pyongyang. It would like to be a bigger player in general in Asian diplomacy and use its unique history with the United States and with China to make it a valuable go-between with other countries including Myanmar and even Iran.

“Vietnam feels it has come of age among nations and wants to play a role in offering its good offices to the United States and other world powers,” says a Vietnamese academic, who lives in the United States and is involved in these early diplomatic moves. He says Vietnam, after the fall of Saigon in 1973 and the abrogation of the peace treaty in 1975, and the United States have come a long way and enjoy very good relations. Polls show the United States is favorably regarded by 78 percent of the Vietnamese population of nearly 100 million. President Obama visited a thrilled Vietnam in May. Eight percent of the foreign students studying in the United States are from Vietnam.

But all is not completely rosy. The foreign policy establishment in Washington, as well as a plethora of civil rights groups, worries about human rights in Vietnam, its authoritarian ways and the treatment of dissidents.

Particularly vexing to those who would like to see Vietnam become a kind of Asian Switzerland, friendly to all and skilled at bringing disputatious parties together, is the treatment of journalists, bloggers and others who are imprisoned when they run afoul of the Vietnamese leadership’s sensitivities. Press freedom is high on the list of reforms the West in general would like to see if Vietnam is to realize the role which it seeks.

For its part, Vietnam would like to see the United States take a stronger stand against China’s virtual annexation of the South China Sea and to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. Here, there are real fears that the hostile political climate in the United States will do damage to its relations with Southeast Asia at a critical time.

Still, Vietnam wants ever-closer relations the United States and a bigger diplomatic role in Asia. The feelers are out. — For InsideSources

On the Acela Express from Washington to Boston, I am searching my hopper of words for one that describes the feeling of watching on television Donald Trump’s press conference in Florida. I am, as it were, dumbfounded by the braggart.

Watching Trump is like watching one of nature’s lethal creatures, say a mamba or a crocodile. One wonders at the deadly speed of the snake, coiled and ready to strike its victim: a thing of beauty in its lethality, mesmerizing; or the evil certainty of the crocodile, always ready to go from seeming lethargy to lighting assault, if the unwary should seek to share the river bank.

The man who would be president has the dubious appeal of a bombaster, as he trashes people who have given their lives to public service with success, like Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Men and women who have earned high marks in the esteem of their professions and the nation. They are fools, losers, stupid and worse in the profane stream of venom that passes for campaigning from Trump. He is a man who has so little respect for others that you wonder what he does respect, besides his own money (which he refers to frequently) and foreign strongmen, like Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

Name-calling is part of the political dialogue, but this is something other again, this Niagara Falls of abuse, of disrespect of verbal infamy; this sick, sick performance of denigrating the United States so he can save it. It is a risible attack on Americans who have built America. It also is an attack on America, and an insight into Trump’s ignorance of the world. By the way, Mr. Trump, America is still the world’s most powerful country.

Trump calls everyone he encounters names. He also calls them liars; his opponents in the primaries were liars, as is his Democratic opponent now. He calls the media “scum.”

The big lies, though, are Trump lies. He is a fairground barker, telling people anything to get them into his tattered tent.

The United States is not despised in the world: We are admired. The economy is not a disaster: It has been growing to the envy of other advanced economies.

America is great right now, today. There are problems here in social equality and other things, and huge problems in the Middle East – some, but not all, could be blamed on policy under the former and current presidents. The world still looks to America to protect, to invent, and to do the right thing.

Trump, who finds nothing good in anyone in public life and nothing good in public policy, has given us no idea of how he would govern and whom he would rely upon to bring about the Age of Trump. All he has released is a list of conservative judges from whom he will appoint Supreme Court nominees.

When it comes to policy, all we know is that he is going to build a wall across the southern frontier, abrogate a lot of treaties, engage in trade wars, leave Europe open to Russian aggression, and extract money for his schemes from our allies and friends.

Yet, sitting behind me on this train, a woman has been praising Trump to her two traveling companions, and only stops to call someone on her cell phone and further praise him. Since biblical times, serpents have been a source of fascination. The woman behind me would follow the political version into the White House. — For InsideSources

Then he met Roger Ailes and installed him as head of what would become America’s most successful cable news channel, Fox News Channel, also known as Fox News.

And so the formula of conservatism and sex, pioneered on a newspaper in Britain, came to television and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1969 Murdoch bought an ailing British newspaper called The Sun. He bought it from the Daily Mirror Group, then the publishers of the most successful tabloid in Britain, The Daily Mirror, and its sibling The Sunday Mirror (where I once worked). The Daily Mirror was firmly left-wing and The Sun, if anything, more so. It had started life as The Daily Herald and was owned collectively by the trade union movement.

The new owners, who used an old formula — the working class as exploited, downtrodden and hopelessly dependent on the largesse of their employers — failed to attract or excite readers.

Murdoch, fresh from Australia (although he had worked earlier as an editor in London), looked around and saw something quite different. He saw a new worker, who owned a car, took vacations in Spain (thanks to jet travel), and did not feel oppressed.

The British workers — especially working men — had thrown off the past and were now much more like the workers of Australia and the United States. It was also a period of sexual freedom.

These workers would be Murdoch’s target.

Overnight, without warning, he turned The Sun from far-left whingeing to triumphant far-right throatiness. Murdoch had realized that the working man had become a man of property.

As for sex, Murdoch would go further. British tabloids had always published “cheesecake” — pictures of busty, young women in bikinis. Murdoch took off the tops: Every day, on Page Three, he published a photo of an English rose blooming in a bikini bottom. It was bold and it was brave and it worked.

The Sun, with its new brawny politics of nationalism, anti-European attitude, right-wing enthusiasm and topless beauties, was a triumph. It began a meteoric rise, almost entirely at the expense of the forelock-tugging Daily Mirror.

The formula was born: right-wing nativism and sex.

When Murdoch came to the United States, he found the society was less louche and he could not put nudity into his newspapers. Also, there was a tradition of editorial duality: Although the politics of newspapers was not concealed, readers wanted to think that the news was impartial. Murdoch bought newspapers in San Antonio, New York, Boston and Chicago, and he started a weekly supermarket tabloid.

None succeeded and gradually Murdoch sold off these properties, except for The New York Post. Murdoch’s daughter, Elisabeth, told me that he was the first to admit that he had misunderstood the U.S. market. That is probably why when he bought The Wall Street Journal in 2007, he was careful to respect that property and to change it incrementally — for the better.

But the formula was not dead. When Ailes applied it to television, it worked all over again. Except this time, the result was even more spectacular in political power and profit.

Fox News is the voice of raucous conservatism, all served up with sex appeal.

Ailes clearly has had a fascination with beautiful, blond women reading the news — and other channels are going that way.

Ailes has done more than apply the formula: He has applied it with brio. He has given the news pace. It moves along and little inventions, like “Around the World in 80 Seconds,” are part of that energizing.

I visited with Ailes when Fox News was just beginning its ascent. He was thrilled with the fact that it had just drawn slightly ahead of CNN Headline News. I do not think he realized then how potent the formula would be and what heights his creation would reach.

Just when it needs it most, the United States is losing its most potent weapon in the fight against climate change, which might better be called global pollution. One nuclear plant is closed in Vermont, two are under threat of closure in Illinois, and the only plant in climate-conscious California is to close.

Just these four plants represent a substantial withdrawal of clean, carbon-free electricity from the market, mostly to be replaced by natural gas, and some wind and solar. Gas will do the bulk of the generating, and it is a carbon- emitter — less than coal, but a carbon source nonetheless.

What is more, these plants are up and running, which means none of the pollution associated with construction, steel-making or quarrying will have to be repeated. Some, including Marvin Fertel, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, have expressed fears that 20 more nuclear plants may yet close.

The ostensible reason for these closures is that market forces dictate them. That bald statement implies that electricity is bought and sold as freely as any multi-sourced commodity.

But electricity is not traded in any conventional way. And it is weighted in favor of the short term and political goals.

The trouble started when it was decided to deregulate electricity markets in the 1990s. The goal had nobility: Consumers would have choice. At least that is how it was sold by advocates, such as Enron.

Well, choice did not really work for consumers. But it has worked for some large industrial customers, who have been able to shop for price.

Mostly, deregulation has created two kinds of utilities: those that swallowed the deregulation pill, and those that did not, mostly in the South. The northern tier of utilities, under pressure from their state governments, deregulated, some even selling off their generating assets.

The result has been other than anticipated: Consumers have had little or no choice, and the market has set about exterminating long-lived plant, like nuclear, in favor of today’s cheapest fuel – at this moment, natural gas.

The utilities which have remained strictly regulated by their state utility commissions have been more secure financially and able to raise money more cheaply. The leader in this pack, the giant Southern Company, headquartered in Atlanta, has become a technological innovator as well as a builder of new nuclear plant.

Deregulation of the telephone monopoly — often cited during the passion to deregulate electricity — created a profusion of innovations. By contrast, deregulating electricity has just brought about a rush to the cheapest fuel of the day.

Electric utilities operate what are known as natural monopolies. Competing entities cannot install a new set of transmission wires, so the deregulated electric market had to be contrived. It was also subject to political and cultural manipulation, as the solar and wind lobbies insisted that their product get preference. Coal was edged out financially, before environmental concerns.

Deregulated utilities have formed transmission organizations to rationalize the system. These are the independent system operators, such as the Midwest ISO or PJM in the Mid-Atlantic. They auction power and the auction system favors the cheapest kilowatt on offer.

That sounds fair, right? Not quite. Some of the power comes from wind and solar, which has been subsidized by an array of tax preferences and other government supports.

Many states have renewable energy portfolios which decree that a percentage of the power has to come from these renewable resources. This is fine because they produce no carbon. But they do not produce that much reliable electricity either. It takes a lot of solar arrays or wind turbines — and then only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing — to produce the same electricity as a nuclear power plant or an old-fashioned, coal-fired power plant. They need reliable backup – and that is natural gas, a fossil fuel.

Also to replace a nuclear plant with renewables chews up a lot of land, whether solar arrays or wind farms. Imperfect markets produce imperfect results. — For InsideSources

“How do you do. I’m here for the reporter’s job. I have a demo tape I made for the chairman to see.”

“That’s nice, but we can get to that later — probably much later.”

“Won’t the chairman want to see my work?”

“He may ask one of the producers to look at it, or he may not. The chairman relies on his instincts and what he sees in his reporters.

“I see you’ve dressed for success: a short skirt and a gravity-challenged blouse neckline. These are important in television journalism; important to your reporting and the ratings.

“Good reporting and ratings are the same thing here. You know, gets you through the door. Gets you the job.

“The chairman is a great journalist and he can pick talent. That’s why he goes for former beauty queens. He has found they are uniquely qualified; besides with teleprompters and eager young producers, well, they can concentrate on their unique gifts.

“The chairman will assign you a hairdresser, a makeup artist and a fashion consultant. He may recommend you get those legs insured. Know what I mean?”

“You mean beauty before brains?”

“The chairman has enough brains for everyone on air. He believes in talking heads with legs. The ratings prove he’s right. Look at PBS: no legs, no ratings.”

“I was voted Miss Nuclear Waste in Las Vegas.”

“I wouldn’t mention the nuclear part. Just emphasize Las Vegas, dear.

“If you want some advice, watch those roots. Whatever you spend on your appearance, keep the blonde look. We don’t want the viewers to think you’re a brunette. The chairman wants graduates from Peroxide University.

“But I’m a brunette. People say I have beautiful brown hair.”

“There’s only beautiful blonde hair on this network. That’s in our style book, before the part about how we describe terrorists.”

“I have a BA in journalism.”

“I wouldn’t mention that around here. No, dear, no. The chairman likes to say, ‘Journalism schools are for losers.’

“If you want to work here, tell him something interesting like who you’re dating and what turns you on – you know, on dates. Lobster dinner, that kind of thing. Get my meaning?”

“You mean sex?”

“Don’t mention it. Let the chairman imagine your college years for himself.

“He’s nearly ready for you now.

“A few tips: Lean across his desk. Sometimes he doesn’t catch what you’re saying. Don’t sit before he does and, if you can, turn around a few times. He likes to assess how well you’ll do if you’re interviewing someone on a doorstep who doesn’t want to be interviewed on this network. That’s most people who aren’t on the same political wavelength: intellectuals, communists, and people from The New York Times.”

“I read all the newspapers every day: The National Enquirer, The New York Post and The Daily News.”

“The ability to read is important. Some of our biggest names use cue cards as well as the teleprompter. Also on talk shows, insults are important, like brain dead, pinhead, commie and, especially, loser.

“Just remember, television is a visual medium — and the chairman is very visual. But don’t worry, he’s not tactile.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t worry, dear, you’ll be reading the evening news in no time, if you don’t put on weight or have tattoos where they show.”

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